Sneak Thief

Gr 4–6—Hush lives with her mother in a trailer park on the edge of town. Food is scarce and her mother's endless stream of bad boyfriends makes Hush's world dangerous. She doesn't regularly attend school and she spends her days fending for herself and sneak-thieving. The compulsion to steal objects is something Hush is ashamed of and tries unsuccessfully to ignore, especially because she's often tempted to steal things like dental floss and candlesticks and not practical items such as food and toiletries. When Hush and her mother have an altercation, the girl's urge to steal is so strong that she is more careless than usual, gets caught, and the secrets of her home life are revealed to local law enforcement. Hush is placed with a foster mother and begins to thrive in her new home. She also discovers a magical gift: the ability to see pain. The pain appears to her as wiggling flashes of light that she plucks away and stores in a mason jar. At first, she is happy to help relieve the pain of the people around her, but then the protagonist starts to fear her gift when she realizes that pain can be a teacher and that the absence of it can be harmful. Readers spend much of the story in Hush's head as she struggles to survive her home life, control her compulsion to steal, and hold on to a new best friend. The setting and the dialogue is infused with Southern flavor, making this book a solid read-alike for Natalie Lloyd's A Snicker of Magic and Sheila Turnage's Three Times Lucky.